"The Winfield Heritance" is a Cthulhu Mythos short story by Lin Carter which originally appeared in the 1981 anthology Weird Tales #3 (named after but not to be confused with the Weird Tales magazine). It is part of Carter's Xothic Legend Cycle.
Robert M. Price wrote a sequel to it called "The Soul of the Devil-Bought".
Synopsis[]
Set in 1936, the story is presented as a document written by Winfield Phillips to be sent to his boss, Dr. Seneca Lapham, in the event of Phillips' death or disappearance.
A resident of Arkham, Phillips travels to California to attend the funeral of his uncle, Hiram Stokely, and is pleased by the opportunity to resume friendship with his cousin, Brian Winfield. The two cousins are surprised to find out that Uncle Hiram, who had severed ties with the rest of the family, had named the two as the only heirs to his estate, including a library filled with rare volumes. Next to the house is an empty field where hundreds of human bodies, dating back to pre-colonial days, had been excavated.
Exploring the library, Phillips finds rare books of poetry and popular horror fiction, while Brian locates a secret passage and finds the Necronomicon as translated by John Dee. Reading from the old grimoire, the cousins learn about the Yuggya, which resemble oversized worms and have access to subterranean sources of gold and wealth, which they offer to men in exchange for sacrificial victims. The legend makes them think about their uncle's mysterious fortune and the field of dead bodies ranging from ancient to recent. Exploring further, they reach a staircase with steps littered with precious coins and gemstones, leading down to an underground pool where Phillips witnesses Brian being captured and dragged underwater by a Yugg.
Phillips flees the scene in terror, but later starts to hear the telepathic call of the Yuggya, telling him that he's given them a fresh sacrifice and is now in league with them. Rather than resisting them, Phillips wonders about all those bodies and how the "legacy" of serving the Yuggya must have passed from one to another for generations, and muses that he might move into his uncle's residence as it belongs to him now, part of "the Winfield heritance".
Behind the Mythos[]
This story notably includes a sort of literary in-joke in which the authors of rare books discovered in Hiram Stokely's library are all protagonists or deuteragonists of other Mythos tales, including the likes of Robert Blake, Justin Geoffrey and Halpin Chalmers, among many others.